One sign of the democratic spirit in the progress of American Art is to be noticed in the fact that women have participated largely in the honours gained by the pioneers. It is noteworthy, for instance, that the first book on Women Painters should have been written by an American lady, Mrs Ellet, as far back as 1859. Mrs. Ellet showed great industry, but following a custom rashly encouraged by writers on art, she believed that she could teach painting and sculpture by the use of words alone, in recording biographical facts, and in offering criticisms on work that her readers could not see in illustrations. Written history is the phonograph of all past centuries, but the understanding of art owes little to its words. Still, the enthusiasm that fired Mrs. Ellet was shared by many of her countrywomen, and to it we owe some truly clever artists, like the four sculptors, Harriet Hosmer, Florence Freeman, Edmonia Lewis and Emma Stebbins, or like the following painters: Emily Sartain (portraits and genre), Sara M. Peale (portraits), Mrs. J. W. Dewing (portraits, subject pictures, flowers and still-life), Annie C. Shaw (cattle and landscapes), Mrs. Adèle Fassett (portraits) Mrs. Elisa Greatorex (landscapes), Mrs. Henry A. Loop (portraits), Ella A. Moss (portraits), Jennie Brownscombe (subject pictures), May Alcott (copies after J. M. W. Turner and still-life), Elizabeth Boott (figure subjects), Charlotte B. Coman (landscapes in the manner of Corot), and that delicate recorder of pleasant secrets learnt from nature in the fields, Fidelia Bridges. The very titles of this lady's pictures have the fragrance of field flowers or else they glow with the plumage of birds. It has been said of Fidelia Bridges that her art sings little pastoral lyrics, and her art is certainly very fresh and sweet, charmed with much sympathetic appreciation of nature in some of her unnumbered smiling moods. For Fidelia Bridges, like Birket Foster, paints as though the year were all springtime, a series of twelve May months, all full of gaiety and bounty. She seldom takes heed of that eternal warfare which accompanies Nature's bountifulness, filling the seed-carrying winds with the presence of death, and setting every living thing to prey upon another. To this part of Nature's life Fidelia Bridges usually shuts her eyes, unlike Miss E. M. Carpenter, whose landscape art reveals at times the menacing suggestion of great rivers and of high solitary mountains.